Update 11/2005: Google has now given most, if not all, registered users 100 invitations that they can share. It has suddenly become much easier to get a free Gmail account.
Free email accounts have been around in abundance since shortly after the Web became popular. It is the one type free service that was almost unaffected after the end of the dot-com boom. There are very few active Internet users that don’t have at least one Hotmail, Yahoo, or other free email account.
The one problem that many face with free email accounts is that there are strict limits placed on the amount of email that can be stored in the popular free accounts. This really gets to be a problem when you either get lots of email or when the spam comes in faster than you can delete it. It’s a real headache when you start missing messages because your inbox is full.
Fortunately, there is a new trend among some free email providers to dole out more email storage space than most people will ever be able to fill. When Google announced on April 1, 2004 that they would be providing free one gigabyte email accounts, I and many others thought it was an April Fool’s joke. Well, it’s no joke, at this writing, Google is running a beta test with invited users, and I suspect the service will be generally available soon.
Google has inspired several other companies to offer free one gigabyte email accounts. A couple of these have actually beaten Google to the punch and made their accounts publicly available before Google’s offering.
On page two, I’ll give you some of the reasons you might want a one gigabyte email account, and on page three, I’ll give a quick run down of the features of Google’s service as well as those of Walla and Spymac.
